In a marketplace where in-demand technology skills are ever-changing, it’s crucial for tech professionals to familiarize themselves with the latest trends in order to stay competitive and determine their future career moves.

Tech professionals have told Dice that their big career concerns include finding an acceptable position to match their skillset and keeping that skillset up-to-date.

Dice recently leveraged job postings and data from our annual salary survey to analyze the fastest-growing skills*, and found that the following are driving the most salary growth:

Spark

With job postings up 120% year-over-year on Dice, demand for this open-source cluster-computing framework is broad-based. Government contractors and financial-services firms are just a few of the groups eager to find candidates with this skillset.

2015 Average Salary: $113,214

Big Data and Cloud

As companies expand their tech infrastructures, they need cloud and Big Data services such as Azure (#2), Hive (#8) and Cassandra (#9) for data storage, analysis and security. Big Data and cloud-related skills dominated the Highest Paid Skills list on Dice’s salary survey for the second straight year.

2015 Average Salary:Big Data: $121,328Azure: $110,207

Salesforce

This customer-service platform serves as the bedrock for many companies’ customer service departments. Demand for Salesforce professionals seems unlikely to decline anytime soon. Employers are even willing to offer telecommuting options to lure Salesforce talent.

2015 Average Salary: $107,810

JIRA

JIRA, a project-management platform that’s free for open-source projects and nonprofits, has enjoyed an increasing rate of adoption over the past few years. With software teams always on the lookout for professionals with project-management experience, counting JIRA among your core skills is a great way to stand out.

2015 Average Salary: $111,103

The message to tech professionals honing these skills is clear: take advantage of opportunities now.

*Skill must have more than 1,000 postings to be included in this analysis.

Regarding the comment above about focusing on core skills. It is s good idea to focus on them but don’t forget the specifics mentioned above because the recruiters are looking for those on your resume. For example, Agile/Scrum is a core skill but if you know how to use the JIRA tool, you have s better chance. Interesting: I noticed that Cloud(core skill?) and Azure(Cloud platform by Microsoft) are both on the list.

Like other people have noted, JIRA in itself isn’t going to get you a salary above $110k, so this article is misleading. It’s much more likely that a Project Manager, Product Manger, Software Developer makes that much and just knows how to use JIRA. It isn’t a core skill. I’m just hope no one goes out and learns JIRA with the intent of making that much money.